HTML symbol reference (thing)

HTML uses the idea of something called a "character entity". Put something between an & and a semicolon, and you will get some symbol. For example, &lt; is <, &gt; is >, and &amp; is &. Most symbols can be accessed by both a number (&#38;) and a word (&amp;).

By using the character entities, you can use symbols in your e2 writeups. Two more symbols you will find extremely useful are &#91; and &#93;, [ and ], which will allow you to use square brackets on e2 without hardlinking.

Since there are a lot of these symbols, remembering all or even most of them is impossible, and most reference guides are incomplete, following for your reading pleasure is what according to the w3c is all of the standard defined html entities. Any time you see this reference something as a U followed by a hexadecimal number, the thing being referenced is the unicode sybol with that hex value. Other places you might want to look would be everyone's writeup and the fourth chapter of n-wing's writeup on E2 HTML tags, as well as HTML special characters. Information on the source of this document is at the end.

One more funky thing; For some odd reason, there are a great many of these entities (mostly above &#255;) that Netscape (OK, and some other browsers) supports the number-based version of but not the word-based version of. As such i have used the number-based version for all of the symbols below, and i suggest you do as well, even though it will make your HTML unreadable, and is cruel toward the lynx users.

The first bit (before the first HR) of this was generated by applyings/\<!ENTITY\s*(\w+)\s*CDATA\s*\"\&\#(\d+)\;\"\s*-- (.+) --\>/\<li\>\&\1; -- \&amp\;\1; -- \&amp\;\#\2; -- \3/g;
to the definitions at http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-entities-961125. The page, at the time of this posting, was labelled